Page 185 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015185Now that the most widespread instruments that provide access to stories are smartphones and tablets – that is, objects we always carry around with us – we are also affected by push-type stories with propositions of many kinds. And it is not just authors or publishers that invite us to buy content, but also companies and brands that wish to establish a relationship with us, by conveying to us emotions related to the value system they represent. Also in this case, very old techniques such as “content marketing”are being revived thanks to the unprecedented potential of the technologies we use.On the following pages we will attempt to analyse all this with specific examples in order to illustrate how, in only a few years, stories have returned to the centre stage of any media indus- try, the possibility of gauging the emotional impact of stories, how advertising is being used, and how technology has made them an area of deep innovation.We will end with a quick survey of what the Internet is today, leaving open all channels that have yet to be explored to harness the potential of this extraordinary context.Business modelsThe crisis that is dragging on in the various sectors of the media industries stems from three main factors:• the disruption of certain companies that have rapidly become global (Google, Facebook, Amazon and others);• the consequent global dimension of econo- mies of scale to compete;• cost structures that have ceased to be sustain- able now that the prices of content (stories) are low and experiencing a downward trend.The changes we are experiencing are structural and are shaping a landscape that is very different to the previous one. However, the ways of achieving turnover and profit margins (business models) in the new digital context are not much different from the traditional schemes and can be regrouped into four categories:• e-commerce, that is, the sale of stories (con- tent) in exchange for a price and in different forms (one-off sale, streaming, lending);• advertising, stories create interaction and engagement with communities, making it possible to define in real time the profile of the person who accesses content;• paid (and also free) services for anyone who wants to write, publish and read stories;• data, which is the chief novelty in the new content industry, because the possibilities of gauging the impact of stories are vastly superior to those of the past.Platform publishingThe creation of publishing platforms based on the Web infrastructure has not only made it possible for practically anyone to publish (make public, accessible to others) a story but, aboveMarco Ferrario